If you ever wondered why Apple is having such difficulty with publishers who are falling over themselves to stick their content on its shiny toys, it is apparently over Steve Jobs wanting to know everything about magazine readers.
It seems that Steve Jobs believes that all the personal data that is collected on the magazine subscriber belongs to him and that newspapers cannot sell subscriptions for their own magazines. Initially the magazine publishers thought that the iPad would be the saviour of their industry, however suddenly they are looking to Google’s
Android tablets instead.
Apple is offering publishers the ability to sell app subscriptions through iTunes, 70 percent of the revenue from each sale and the ability to get the name, mailing address and email address of their customers. Not surprisingly none of the big publishers have gone for it. For a start, 30 percent is outrageous but what bugs them is they are not allowed to collect the credit card data from the sale of their own product. It is vital for media marketing, and without it they can’t offer print/digital bundles.
Apparently what the US firms are doing is pushing Android bundles in the hope that Steve Jobs will see sense.
Stumbling block with publishers
Nick Farell
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